ZERO1 Blog

It is our great honor to announce Christopher Haas, the architect and exhibition designer at the ZERO1 Garage, has won a Merit Award from the AIA San Francisco’s Design Awards Program for his exhibition design, Discovery (2012), featured during the 2012 ZERO1 Biennial “Seeking Silicon Valley”. The design is an open framework featuring meandering walls and non-classical spaces that evoke in visitors a sense of wonder, play, and discovery.

On April 5th during South First Fridays at the ZERO1 garage I invited visitors to contribute to my research by playing a digital collaborative storytelling game. The game was “story-story” (also commonly known as the add on story game), where one person starts a story and then each person takes a turn continuing the story. The modification I made to the original game was having the visitors alternate between adding an image or a sentence that would move the story forward. It was really interesting to see how the same starting point of the story could lead to so many different narrative directions and I begin to understand how people used images to move a story forward.

A.N.D. Social Practice – the project I am doing for my ZERO1 Fellowship - is also about connecting aspects of thought and practice that aren’t necessarily manifested; an intriguing and worthwhile pursuit. For this blog, I wanted to share two different projects by two different artists, and extracting what I see as a common aspect in both. These two projects were part of a six-project compilation I prepared for April's South First Fridays event at the ZERO1 Garage. The projects are shown in these two videos – by the way, if you are in a hurry, give yourself more time: the total duration is almost one hour (but it is well worth it)!

I find myself in the remarkable position of being a ZERO1 Fellow, engaged in the challenge of bringing underlying ideas from previous work to the foreground to shape a project that enables connections between disparate places and circumstances. The underlying force is empathy; that curious ability to project ourselves into the experiences of others. To paraphrase Susan Sontag in Regarding the pain of others, place ourselves on the map of another’s suffering, bypassing sympathy, and imagine their suffering as our own.[Susan Sontag. Regarding the pain of others (Picador, 2004),103.]

I am really excited to start sharing my process through this blog and to continue to update my fellowship space at the ZERO1 Garage. As some of you may be aware, I am an artist/ designer Fellow embedded at Adobe’s Creative Technologies lab. I work with a group computer research scientists researching the field of computer graphics, data visualization, human computer interaction and machine learning. You can know more about my Project Fellowship here.

At my fellowship space visitors have been able to contribute to my project by posting sticky notes of the thoughts that have come to their minds related to my research topics. I loved the space; and it has been really wonderful to get feedback from all of you. One of the great findings that I discovered through this feedback process is that people care a lot about storytelling! I really enjoyed reading all of the posts and mini stories, emotions and thoughts that people shared with me.